Hi! I'm working on a project for National History Day, my project theme is how humanity viewed space travel and aliens and such in the above time periods. I'd love some primary and secondary resources as well as some major impacts that these things had. Thanks for your help!
I recommend checking out the New York Times's editorial mocking Robert Goddard in 1920 for thinking rockets would work in the vacuum of space. They issued a retraction three days before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed in the Sea of Tranquillity.
After that, I would recommend reading about Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
This would normally be way off-topic here, but in this case it's a primary source for what people thought of space travel in the early 20th century.
Of course by then it was common knowledge that the moon is a satellite of the earth, and that the earth is a satellite of the sun.
Nonetheless, Georges Méliès's Le Voyage Dans la Lun was a huge hit. Men threw their top-hats in the air while well-dressed and fantastically mustachioed fellows found subterranean (or to be literary, lunatic) mushroom lairs and hostile moon-people ...